I don’t have a hat because I was once a wannabe rockstar, but…

Serious post, actually. No, I’m not the guy in the picture. But I was once a high speed maniac on the roads of Southern New Jersey. Bad? Maybe. I had reflexes then I still have. Old as I am, I can catch a glass skidding off a counter before it hits the floor. Fact. Ask my wife. Excuse? No. But I always knew better than to speed through residential districts. It was only when I got on the open road and the country curves that I went to the limit, sometimes to 120 mph.

What was that all about? Discovery. Research. Finding the limits of machines and me. Forty maybe thirty years ago. Had a friend who was the same way. We chased each other everywhere at incredible speeds. Faster, faster, faster was our mantra. All gone. We got older.

He’s like me now. A little old lady on the highways. He prefers to let his wife drive him everywhere. And he yells at her when she even reaches the speed limit in residential areas.

I no longer exceed the speed limit. Ever. Not even on the Turnpike. My peripheral vision is still what it was when I was a maniac. But now it’s looking constantly for children darting unexpectedly off sidewalks, stranded cars, stupid people erupting from side streets, old guys and millennials on bicycles, every single lunkheaded woman and her children in a parking lot, and all the bad things that can happen with tractor trailers and overloaded pickup trucks on two lane thorofares.

The bad old me learned how to look, to see, to anticipate, to be prepared to crash myself if I made a bad decision. Now I don’t want to make a bad decision.

Women don’t ever seem to learn this rabid kind of caution. They speed on the turnpike, tailgate, run yellow lights, and hustle just a bit too much on residential streets because their intentions are good and mean no harm. They never learned just how quickly and bad a driving decision can go. Until it happens.

Women drivers make bad old lady drivers. For some reason they’re also always in a hurry. Real men are something else. They stopped being in a hurry a long time ago. Unless a woman is involved.

No. I’m not Lauda. But old as I am, if the need arose, I could still scald the highway the way I did in my twenties. Like riding a bicycle. I can still catch a glass falling off a table. and I can still chase a rat up his own ass on the open road. Just don’t do it unless there’s some need.